Hunting for elusive “ghost elephants”
Deep in the Angolan Highlands lurks a rumored new species of elephant. Conservationist and ornithologist Steve Boyes has been searching for this elusive herd for years and the story of…
A unicorn-like Spinosaurus found in the Sahara
The Spinosaurus is a sail-backed, crocodile-snouted dinosaur that Hollywood depicted as a giant terrestrial predator capable of taking down a T. rex in Jurassic Park 3. Then they changed their…
Feds take notice of iOS vulnerabilities exploited under mysterious circumstances
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has ordered federal agencies to patch three critical iOS vulnerabilities that were exploited over a 10-month span in hacking campaigns conducted by three distinct…
Asteroid defense mission shifted the orbit of more than its target
On September 26, 2022, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft crashed into a binary asteroid system. By intentionally ramming a probe into the 160-meter-wide moonlet named Dimorphos, the smaller…
How moss helped convict grave robbers of a Chicago cemetery
Back in 2009, residents were scandalized when employees at Burr Oak Cemetery in the Chicago suburb of Alsip were accused of exhuming old graves in order to resell the burial…
Why are vertebrate eyes so different from those of other animals?
After losing its original eyes, one of our distant ancestors may have done what evolution does best: tinkered with what was available, reshaping a single central visual organ into two…
During WWI, a daredevil pilot helped invent the first ‘drones’
On November 21, 1916, pilot and inventor Lawrence Sperry was flying over Long Island’s Great South Bay with his student Dorothy Rice Pierce when his plane suddenly plunged into the…
A 3D-printed wheelchair is helping this turtle walk again
A Gulf Coast box turtle named Moses, missing both of its back legs, is getting a second chance at mobility thanks to a caring human and a 3D printer. Using…
Japan eyes distant island for nuclear waste dump
Nuclear power is on the rise around the world, but with it comes an extremely pressing question: where will all of the radioactive waste be stored? For Japan, one answer…
Trump gets data center companies to pledge to pay for power generation
On Wednesday, the Trump administration announced that a large collection of tech companies had signed on to what it’s calling the Ratepayer Protection Pledge. By agreeing, the initial signatories—Amazon, Google,…